... and studying the British arms trade for the government, acknowledging this in writing in the mid 1960s. From the seller's end the game becomes finding the bent official with influence. A process which involves 'commissions' is no big problem for business  in which 'commissions' are commonplace  but it has been for politicians, especially members of the Labour Party whose official ethos before messrs. Blair and Brown was something vaguely along the 'merchants of death' line. The Labour government of Harold Wilson solved that problem in 1966 by creating an insulation layer, the Defence Sales 1 Over a hundred source notes to several of the chapters, for example. 2 It's suggested but not demonstrated in ...

... This is the final chapter of my The Rise of New Labour, published in 2002. It didn't get any attention and didn't sell but is still available in ebook form. I was prompted to make this available because of the rehabilitation of Gordon Brown recently. Lest we forget, he is one of the chief architects of the economic mess we are in. This chapter shows how. Robin Ramsay Chapter 8 Into office 'It is scarcely credible that Britain should once again be crucified on an excessively high exchange rate.  Wynne Godley, The Observer (Business) 23 August 1998. By the time Labour took office Brown and Blair had promised to toe the conservative line on economic ...

... DC where he works as 'senior counsellor' to the weapons and security consultants. Cohen was Robertson's opposite number at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration.2 Reporting on the referendum for the BBC from Glasgow was Sarah Smith, the former Channel 4 News Washington correspondent, who is the sister-in-law of Robertson's son Malcolm. Sarah is the oldest daughter of former Labour leader John Smith. The Robertson family were out in force with leading Labour lights in Scotland for Sarah's own wedding in 2007 to US-born former soldier and novelist Simon Conway.3 The ceremony was conducted by the father of Labour Shadow 1 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish- independence/10751728/Scottish-independence-would-be-cat aclysmic- for-the-world-ex-Nato-head-warns.h ...

... See <http://www.li.com/activities/publications/looting-ukraine-how- east-and-west-teamed-up-to-steal-a -country>. 8 See <http://johnhelmer.net/?p =11289>. A s winter approachs some people suffer from seasonally affective disorder (SAD). I get CAD, conference affective disorder, a creeping gloom produced by reports from the Labour Party conference. It's not just that they're so obviously more concerned with careers than the national interest  that's a given these days  they're so incompetent. Take shadow chancellor Ed Balls' speech to conference on 22 September. The penny has dropped that some sort of apology needs to be made for the mess he and Gordon Brown created ...

... , a former member of the Reagan administration, whose brother and father have also been key figures in US-UK relations. He also steers clear of the pro-Israel lobby which, to this reviewer, is an important addition to the Establishment of the 1950s described by Fairlie, Thomas et al. To write of Neil (now Lord) Kinnock and Labour without mentioning Robert Maxwell and of New Labour without reference to Michael (now Lord) Levy and Jon (now Lord) Mendelsohn is a serious omission. Some readers may find Jones a bit thin in places they know in depth. But wasn't it ever thus, especially with young writers working on a broad canvas? There will be ...

... their pet politicians. And, of these oligarchs, by far the most powerful since the early 1980s has been Rupert Murdoch. Unfortunately Nick Davies's tremendous Hack Attack demonstrates quite conclusively that far from exaggerating, if anything McBride understated Murdoch's influence, the extent to which modern Britain has been shaped in his image, and the way politicians, both Labour and Conservative, were willing to be of service. Most of the reviews of Hack Attack have focussed on the dramatic story of how Davies and the Guardian hunted down the truth of the hacking scandal despite all the obstacles put in their way by News International, Scotland Yard, the Press Complaints Commission, the rest of the media, ...

... , giving the UK the worst trade to current account balance in the developed world. Germany  where they make things  has the best. In the olden times, and certainly pre-1979, the monthly trade figures were a piece of ritualised political theatre that required urgent announcements, elaborate explanations, and, sometimes, finished political careers (usually Labour). This is no longer the case. Even The Times opined that Britain imports too much and its only hope if it wishes to reverse this is to devalue urgently so that its manufacturing industries can recapture overseas markets. The main stumbling block to this is considered to be the continued maintenance of the pound at too high a level ...

... campaign against Cuba notwithstanding, the Company was confident in its capacity to create and manage Business-friendly regimes. territories. Instead, what has been called 'an archipelago of empire' was preferred.2 0 This meant expanding the British principle of indirect rule by creating and supporting nominally independent regimes that bear all the social costs through extortionate taxation, while assuring that labour and natural resources are freely accessible to US corporations  in Vietnam's case, particularly those operating in Japan. Unlike industrial economies, peasant economies, such as those prevailing in southern Korea and Vietnam, are still structured around land ownership and use. Industrialised populations such as those of Europe and the US already have structures easily manipulated by corporations ...

... it was best not to dwell on Kenya too much!) and later on in Northern Ireland. A substantial literature celebrated British counterinsurgency prowess with the likes of Robert Thompson, Richard Clutterbuck and Frank Kitson being accorded the status of counterinsurgency gurus. Attempts to challenge this consensus were batted away without too much difficulty.1 Until that is, the New Labour decision to provide military support for the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly, the British record was most vulnerable in Kenya where it was always clear that terrible atrocities had been carried out by the military and the police. Two particular books, David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged (2005) and Caroline Elkins' Imperial Reckoning: ...

... as a discipline in England and G๖ttingen to supply scholarship to defend European colonialism,3 it is worth asking what policy purpose The Sleepwalkers is intended to defend. Great Britain has pursued two consistent foreign policy principles since the French Revolution. The first is to control the seas and the access to cheap (or free) raw materials (including labour) throughout the world. The second has been to keep Europe divided against itself both to assure access to its markets and to weaken potential imperial competitors. This was a policy understood even in those ancient days before NATO or the European Union. It was one of the main reasons that England was called 'perfidious Albion' on the Continent ...